The Helm community has developed extensive expertise in creating Kubernetes manifests, but challenges arise when interfacing with managed databases like AWS RDS or Azure CosmosDB. Pulumi, a cloud-native development platform, provides a solution by allowing infrastructure to be expressed as code in familiar programming languages, facilitating the integration of Kubernetes applications with cloud resources. An illustrative example involves using Pulumi to manage Azure and Kubernetes resources, such as creating an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster, a MongoDB-flavored instance of CosmosDB, and deploying a Node.js Helm Chart that utilizes the CosmosDB connection. Pulumi supports deployments across major cloud vendors and Kubernetes, using standard $KUBECONFIG files for compatibility with tools like Helm and kubectl. The platform simplifies cloud-native infrastructure as code by reducing complexity and friction in choosing and combining services from various cloud providers within a consistent programming model.